10 years later —

iPhone X review: Early adopting the future

The most expensive iPhone ever is Apple's proposal for the future of mobile.

Performance: We’re more than ready for AR

The iPhone X runs on the A11 Bionic chip—the same one that powers the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus. We were impressed by that chip’s performance when we tested it in our iPhone 8 review. Our iPhone X benchmarks have shown very similar results, and we remain impressed. Along with the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus, the iPhone X is the fastest phone we have ever tested.

The iPhone 7’s A10 SoC had four cores—two high-performance and two efficiency cores. The A11 features six cores (two high-performance and four efficiency), and every core can be active at once. By contrast, the A10 could only use two at a time.

The A11 chipset also marks the first time Apple has engineered its own GPU. The three-core GPU replaces previous offerings from Imagination Technologies, which were already great. Performance isn’t as dramatically improved here as it is with CPU tasks, but it’s still a step up over the previous generation of iPhones.

Augmented reality

Much has already been written about Apple’s efforts in augmented reality, which accelerated with the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus, but it’s so key to what the iPhone X is that some of it must be repeated here. Apple has brought augmented reality intent to most components that it has updated in this phone. For example, the cameras are now aligned vertically; this is in part because most augmented reality apps run in landscape mode, and by placing the cameras in this arrangement, depth sensing is improved.

All of this CPU and GPU power serves the AR mission, too. They, along with the improved Metal 2 graphics API, allow rendering detailed 3D assets and physics while also processing high-quality images on the camera and showing them on the screen together. Apple has also improved the accuracy of the accelerometer and gyroscope, which are key for AR experiences.

And there's ARKit, a software development basis for augmented reality applications. Google and others have competing platforms that also show promise. That said, ARKit is already supported by millions of iPhones—iPhone 6S and later. Apple has done a lot of the hard work to build an AR platform that developers can use as a strong starting point in creating new apps that work well with all this hardware.

The iPhone X is comprehensively built with AR as its primary concern, with numerous components all serving that same goal in co-supportive ways. The strong performance is at the heart of it all. Existing AR games' and apps' tech really impresses—especially tabletop strategy game The Machines.

Apple CEO Tim Cook has said he believes that AR on iOS will be an explosion of innovation on the level of the original App Store. I'm not sure I'd go quite that far, but Apple has bet big on it at least being the biggest app gold rush in recent years. The apps we see now are neat, but the best is surely yet to come.

Battery life: Still disappointing

Apple’s statements on battery life for the iPhone X confuse expectations a bit. On one hand, the company claims that the iPhone X “lasts up to two hours longer than iPhone 7.” This is hard to actually test in a quantifiable way, because that claim applies to whatever Apple internally considers to be normal daily usage—a cocktail of various tasks that Apple believes represents the average user’s habits. We don’t know the ingredients.

Apple claims 21 hours of talk time over the iPhone 7’s 3G talk time estimate of 14 hours and up to 12 hours of “Internet use.” While Apple’s spec sheets previously broke down Internet use estimates into different numbers for 3G, LTE, and Wi-Fi, the iPhone X spec sheet just provides one Internet use number. Who knows what that means, exactly.

There is a promise of up to 60 hours of wireless audio playback compared to 40 on the iPhone 7, though.

There’s a huge potential boon to battery life in OLED displays: pixels are individually lit, so when a part of the screen is black, the pixels in that area should not be drawing power in an ideal implementation. On the other hand, some past OLED panels have been less efficient when showing bright images than LCDs, which have seen more refinement over the years.

Apple hasn’t made any UI changes to make more of the screen dark in any of its apps, even though in theory that might have produced some battery life gains. That said, there is notably more battery capacity in the iPhone X than in the iPhone 7 or 7 Plus. Apple managed to fit more capacity in part by utilizing a new, double-layered main logic board that saved space compared to the some prior designs.

But with Face ID, OLED, and a significantly larger screen, does that added battery capacity really result in improved battery life, or does it just keep the status quo?

Battery tests

We ran a test to determine battery life when browsing the Web on Wi-Fi. When we run this test, we set the screen brightness to 200 nits and run a script that automatically reloads a series of static webpages over and over until the battery dies. We run this test twice and average the results.

Note that the iPhone 8, 8 Plus, and X were all running iOS 11 in this test, but the iPhone 7 and earlier were tested on earlier versions of iOS—whatever version each device launched with. The goal here is to compare battery life for these phones at their respective launches; results might be different with older phones running newer software.

Enlarge/ The iPhone X didn't show any gains in battery life over recent models despite a larger battery.

These tests can’t possibly confirm or deny Apple’s claim of two additional hours in typical use, since we’re not testing typical use—and what does that mean anyway? But I did use the iPhone X as my main handset for a few days, and my anecdotal experience was that the battery life seemed about the same as that of my iPhone 7 running iOS 11.

Wireless charging

Like the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus, the iPhone X supports wireless charging using the Qi standard. There are already several third-party charging pads on the market, and Apple plans to release its own charging pad that would charge an iPhone, an Apple Watch, and AirPods simultaneously.

Further Reading

I’ve already said quite a lot about this in both our Qi wireless charging explainer and our iPhone 8 review, but I’ll touch on the most important points here. The iPhone X uses a technology called inductive power transfer. There are two coils—one in the phone, and the other in the charger. The coil in the charger induces a current in the phone’s coil by generating an electromagnetic field.

Wireless charging is convenient, especially for topping off your phone by leaving it on a charging pad on your desk while you work, but it’s not as fast as wired charging. The third-party chargers that Apple is currently pushing max out at 7.5 watts—a lot less than some other chargers on the market. But there’s more to it than wattage, in any case.

We tested wireless charging on both Belkin and Mophie charging pads and found that, as expected, the iPhone charges more slowly on these pads than it does when plugged into a wall. This gap is widened further by the iPhone X’s support for fast charging from high-wattage chargers.

To take advantage of that, you’ll have to buy a USB-C to Lightning cable to connect the phone to a higher-wattage power adapter—for example, the 29W, 61W, or 87W MacBook chargers. It’s also possible with third-party adapters, though results are not guaranteed in that case. Testing with a MacBook Pro charger, I found it to be much faster than either the standard iPhone wall adapter or the wireless charging pads.

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Samuel Axon
Based in Los Angeles, Samuel is the Senior Reviews Editor at Ars Technica, where he covers Apple products, display technology, internal PC hardware, and more. He is a reformed media executive who has been writing about technology for 10 years at Ars Technica, Engadget, Mashable, PC World, and many others. Emailsamuel.axon@arstechnica.com//Twitter@SamuelAxon